Electric Literature

Saving literature one reader at a time

Why does history remember some novels, and forget others? Okay, because most novels are forgettable. But there are some, a handful or two, that brush up against greatness itself, and yet don't seem to get a ticket on the literature train.

John Thompson

Award-winning historian and inner-city teacher

Why did President Obama ignore an overwhelming body of education research?

John Thompson

Award-winning historian and inner-city teacher

I'm rooting for Common Core. Anything would be better than the humiliation of today's bubble-in testing.

Pamela Newton

Freelance Writer and English Teacher

I don't know why Nora took an interest in me. I like to think that maybe she saw her younger self in me.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Chancellor's Professor of History, UC Irvine

I recently caught up with Ian Johnson, an old friend and sometimes co-author, and asked him some of the sorts of questions I thought he might get when he is part of an upcoming Asia Society panel on contemporary China.

Hoyt Hilsman

Journalist, screenwriter, critic and former candidate for Congress

The truth is that this dispute is not about saving literature or the sanctity of the literary world, it is about the publishers' business model.

Jim Sleeper

Lecturer in Political Science, Yale University

About bare-knuckled politics, Beltway commentators have little to say. Ezra Klein gives us the inevitable, inexorable, crippling worldview in which the people don't exist, except in Pew polls.

Robert David Jaffee

Author, journalist and mental health activist

Is there an epidemic of mental illness? That is the question posed by Marcia Angell in her two-part series in the New York Review of Books.

Robert Kuttner

Co-founder and co-editor, 'The American Prospect'

Corrosion of the public spirit of scientists and the distortion of scientific inquiry is one of the many costs of pervasive commercialization. And what's truly depressing is that the Obama FDA is only marginally better on this front than George W. Bush's.

Ethan Casey

Author, 'Alive and Well in Pakistan'

Pakistan was still reeling from the assassination of a Punjab governor when the news broke about Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. What does one have to do with the other? All too much.

Menachem Wecker

Religious art blogger, Houston Chronicle

A recent op-ed on Kissinger and his response have generated a good deal of media buzz but the discussions have been largely political and have ignored an interesting art angle to the story.

George Mitrovich

San Diego civic leader

Of all the bookstore and newsstands I have been blessed to browse none matches the selection of quarterly publications and magazines of substance offered by Paras -- none.

Danny Groner

Manager, Shutterstock

An impressive group of thinkers gathered on Tuesday night at the 92nd St. Y to debate the topic of "Has the American Jewish Establishment Failed Young Jews?"

Danny Groner

Manager, Shutterstock

As the intersection between media and politics has become clearer, so too has the blending of technology and culture. And Pogue's at the forefront of this movement.

Claire Gordon

Yale research fellow

Facebook me is better than actual me. Smarter, wittier, funner, prettier. But does Facebook, as a platform, reduce the richness of my personhood? Absolutely.

Laura Flanders

Host, GRITtv

The U.S. is currently shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. It's not just in the Ozarks that the recruiters are the only ones with jobs around: the economy shed 125,000 jobs in June.